


The Last Man

by kiev4am



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Not A Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-03
Updated: 2018-09-03
Packaged: 2019-07-06 13:12:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15886740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiev4am/pseuds/kiev4am
Summary: This is what you tell them.James Clark Ross hears the last known words of Captain Francis R. M. Crozier.An AU in which almost everything is the same.





	The Last Man

The young man runs down from the ridge, calling out; they hear his words before he reaches camp, taut and apprehensive.

"Two men are coming, pulling a sled. White men."

There is only one place for eyes to settle, and that man straightens slowly from the sled he has been loading, cords falling from his only hand. His heart labours so painfully under his furs that for a moment he thinks it must be visible, great breaking waves of feeling, surges more brutal than the thaw. White men, explorers, perhaps Englishmen. He may have known them, moved among them in the drawing-rooms and meeting-halls of naval London, medalled and golden under glittering chandeliers, smiling amid the champagne and the mirrors and the maps. He can hardly see it now; it is a story, a tale told to a child, its vanity as brittle as spun glass. Lost, he stares around the ring of faces until his eyes meet those of the group's eldest hunter, his closest friend among them, though his gaze now is direct and cautious as he asks: "What do you want to do?"

He knows. He has always known, these two long years, what he would do if men came searching. He has whispered the story to himself, hoarded its frail comfort almost as he treasures the little carving of the ship that Silna left him when she walked away. He takes a breath, draws it into him past the raw place in his throat and finds, solid beneath the fading tremors, relief. He steps forward, inviting the man to walk with him. "This is what you tell them," he begins.

When the men arrive he hangs back, keeps the fur hood up and steals a look at their sober, cold-pinched faces. It's Ross; of course it is; and at the shock of recognition his pain and shame and need roar up inside him like the acrid spirit-fires of Carnivale. Ross, determined and decent, knowing to come alone with his interpreter, a bag on his shoulder that no doubt contains daguerreotypes of himself and his fellow officers along with needles and iron blades and whatever else the Admiralty thinks to trade with. Breathless, unable to resist, he shambles towards the tent as they stoop inside it and folds up at the entrance, head bowed beneath the hood, listening. The English and Scottish voices cut his heart like gutting knives. So long, so very long since he has heard such sounds - he savours them like a starving man and for a fleeting moment he is on the ship, rocked in its oaken embrace, soothed by the foregone sweetness of the singing and the curses, the murmurs and the shouts. He hears Ross' urgent questions, hears the clatter of the prints laid out along the floor and the answering tap of fingers upon glass. "What did Francis say?" asks Ross, in agony of helplessness. And then he hears himself, the words he gave to be passed on, the last false story he has left in him to tell.

"Your friend took my hands. He said: Tell those who come after us not to stay. The ships are gone. There is no way through, no Passage. Tell them we are gone; dead, and gone."

It is done. He has kept his word, the pledge he made on every merciless, changeless night since he awoke alone, one-handed and heartsick in Silna's tent. Suddenly he cannot bear it, to be so close, to feel his old world burning at him through the flimsy hides; he staggers to his feet, turns his back upon the tent and walks away, affecting the slouch that hides his height in case Ross or his man should glance outside. He sees his hunting party waiting at the ridge - two adults and two children, a kind, incurious family - and moves weakly to his sled, gesturing with his stump for them to start without him. As they clear the rise he grapples up the cords and follows, his legs mechanical and numb, his eyes unseeing. This must be what it felt like, he thinks, when wounds reopened in the scurvy's teeth. Crueller than Tuunbaq, it chose whom it devoured without logic or reason - he would have given his body freely, would have offered it his every feckless scar to claw apart if it would spare the others, but it had made no difference. He had tried - had kept on trying, wishing for the strength he had only seen in others, tending the last small flames of hope and goodness in the men still stumbling on - he had striven with his entire broken soul, but in the end he could change nothing: not Hickey's madness, not Goodsir's despair, not Jopson lying forsaken on the stones or Little in his chains.

_But today I have wrought the one change that I could, dear friend._ His grief wakes at the thought, tears spilling as he walks, catching as ice in his beard. _You have my whole heart, but I could not give you the monument you deserve, could not even fashion you a grave-slab. Bridgens was right; there should have been poems._

It should have been him; it should have been his wasted body sewn in the threadbare blanket under the scree. There are a thousand ways to die here and he has thought about them all - a long walk to a lonely death, a clean and quiet end to the dragging of his hurts, the unceasing revenant sharpness of his memories. But that would be a breach of promise. _God wants you to live_ , Francis had said - his beautiful voice half scoured away, his strong hands black-bruised and skeletal, unable even to grip, but his eyes still clear and fierce and gentle. So blue; so very blue. _He wants you to live._ It hadn't mattered much to him what God wanted, but he could deny Francis nothing; the commandment holds him, and he has no will to be free of it.

He would have given Francis all he had in life; bereft of that, he has given what remains. Ross will take the story back to England - of Francis as he should have been, the last and best of them, haggard and steadfast, leading them to the end. Francis will walk beyond the sight of men and into history, and his name will be remembered. Always.

_There should have been poems, yes. But I have done my best. I have given you a story, and you will live in it for ever._

The white land and bright sky merge bloodlessly together. The ice-haunted sun casts its rings like a net, and the man who was once James Fitzjames sets his face to the wind and walks doggedly towards it.

**Author's Note:**

> I was reading some fragments of Inuit testimony and the commentary on it, and it made clear just how ambiguous the last survivors' identity really was; there were also a few intriguingly Fitzjames-like details which made me start to imagine an alternate where Francis got James' death and James got Francis' future. Probably not surprisingly, my inner soundtrack for this piece when I was writing it was the achingly bleak, icily beautiful music used by Marcus Fjellström for the final scene of Episode 10.


End file.
